Scientists in Britain have identified the oldest skeleton ever found on the
American continent in a discovery that raises fresh questions about the
accepted theory of how the first people arrived in the New World. The
skeleton's perfectly preserved skull belonged to a 26-year-old woman who died
during the last ice age on the edge of a giant prehistoric lake which once
formed around an area now occupied by the sprawling suburbs of Mexico City.

Scientists from Liverpool's John Moores University and Oxford's Research
Laboratory of Archaeology have dated the skull to about 13,000 years old,
making it 2,000 years older than the previous record for the continent's oldest
human remains. However, the most intriguing aspect of the skull is that it is
long and narrow and typically Caucasian in appearance, like the heads of white,
western Europeans today. Modern-day native Americans, however, have short, wide
skulls that are typical of their Mongoloid ancestors who are known to have
crossed into America from Asia on an ice-age land bridge that had formed across
the Bering Strait.

The extreme age of Peñon woman suggests two scenarios. Either there was a
much earlier migration of Caucasian-like people with long, narrow skulls across
the Bering Strait and that these people were later replaced by a subsequent
migration of Mongoloid people. Alternatively, and more controversially, a group
of Stone Age people from Europe made the perilous sea journey across the
Atlantic Ocean many thousands of years before Columbus or the Vikings.

Silvia Gonzalez, a Mexican-born archaeologist working at John Moores
University and the leader of the research team, accepted yesterday that her
discovery lends weight to the highly contentious idea that the first Americans
may have actually been Europeans. "At the moment it points to that as
being likely. They were definitely not Mongoloid in appearance. They were from
somewhere else. As to whether they were European, at this point in time we
cannot say 'no'," Dr. Gonzalez said.

The skull and the almost-complete skeleton of Peñon woman was actually
unearthed in 1959 and was thought to be no older than about 5,000 years. It
formed part of a collection of 27 early humans in the National Museum of
Anthropology in Mexico City that had not been accurately dated using the most
modern techniques.

"The museum knew that the remains were of significant historical value
but they hadn't been scientifically dated," Dr Gonzalez said. "I
decided to analyse small bone samples from five skeletons using the latest
carbon dating techniques. I think everyone was amazed at how old they
were," she said.

Robert Hedges, the director of Oxford's Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, who
also dated the age of the Turin shroud, carried out the radiocarbon analysis,
which is accurate to within 50 years.

"We are absolutely, 100 per cent sure that this is the date," Dr.
Gonzalez said. The study has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication
next year in the journal Human Evolution.

At 13,000 years old, Peñon woman would have lived at a time when there was a
vast, shallow lake in the Basin of Mexico, a naturally enclosed high plain
around today's Mexico City, which would have been cooler and much wetter than
it is today. Huge mammals would have roamed the region's grasslands, such as
the world's largest mammoths with 12-foot tusks, bear-sized giant sloths,
armadillos as big as a car and fearsome carnivores such as the sabre-toothed
tiger and great black bear. The bones of Peñon woman, named after the
"little heel" of land that would have jutted into the ancient lake,
were well developed and healthy, showing no signs of malnutrition. Dr Gonzalez
found that the two oldest skulls analysed were both dolichocephalic, meaning
that they were long and narrow-headed. The younger ones were short and broad *
brachycephalic * which are typical of today's native Americans and their
Mongoloid ancestors from Asia.

The findings have a resonance with the skull and skeleton of Kennewick man,
who was unearthed in 1996 in the Columbia River at the town of Kennewick in
Washington state. The skull, estimated to be 8,400 years old, is also long and
narrow and typically Caucasian.

James Chatters, one of the first anthropologists to study Kennewick man
before it had been properly dated, even thought that the man may have been a
European trapper who had met a sudden death sometime in the early 19th century.
Kennewick man became the most controversial figure in American anthropology when
native tribes living in the region claimed that, as an ancestor, his remains
should be returned to them under a 1990 law that gave special protection to the
graves and remains of indigenous Americans. The debate intensified after some
anthropologists suggested that

Kennewick man was Caucasian in origin and could not therefore be a direct
ancestor of the native Americans living in the Kennewick area today. Dr
Gonzalez said that the identification of Peñon woman as the oldest known
inhabitant of the American continent throws fresh light on the controversy over
who actually owns the ancient remains of long-dead Americans.

"My research could have implications for the ancient burial rights of
North American Indians because it's quite possible that dolichocephalic man
existed in North America well before the native Indians," she said. But
even more controversial is the suggestion that Peñon woman could be a
descendant of Stone Age Europeans who had crossed the ice-fringed Atlantic some
15,000 or 20,000 years ago.

This theory first surfaced when archaeologists found flint blades and spear
points in America that bore a remarkable similarity to those fashioned by the
Solutrean people of south-western France who lived about 20,000 years ago, when
the ice age was at its most extreme. The Solutreans were the technologists of
their day, inventing such things as the eyed needle and the heat treatment of
flint to make it easier to flake into tools. They also built boats and fished.

Bruce Bradley, an American archaeologist and an expert in flint technology,
believes that the Solutrean method of fashioning flints into two-sided blades
matches perfectly the Stone Age flint blades found at some sites in American.
One of these is the 11,500-year-old flint spear point found in 1933 at Clovis,
New Mexico. Dr Bradley said that the flint blades that came into America with
the early Asian migrants were totally different in concept and mode of
manufacture. Both the Clovis point and the Solutrean flints shared features
that could only mean a shared origin, according to Dr. Bradley. Studies of the
DNA of native Americans clearly indicated a link with modern-day Asians,
supporting the idea of a mass migration across the Bering land bridge. But one
DNA study also pointed to at least some shared features with Europeans that
could only have derived from a relatively recent common ancestor who lived
perhaps 15,000 years ago, the time of the Solutreans.

Not every specialist, however, is convinced of the apparently mounting
evidence of an early European migration. "I personally haven't found it
very convincing," Professor Chris Stringer, the head of human origins at
the Natural History Museum in London, said. "For a start, there are lots
of examples in archaeology where various artefacts from different parts of the
world can end up looking similar even though they have different origins,"
he said. "Most humans in the world at that time were long headed and it
doesn't surprise me that Peñon woman at 13,000 years old is also long headed."

Nevertheless, the remarkable age of the young Paleolithic woman who died by
an ancient lake in Mexico some 13,000 years ago has once again stirred the
controversy over the most extraordinary migration in human history.

Skull measurements on the remains of an isolated group of people who lived
at the southern tip of Mexico's Baja California has stirred up the debate on
the identity of the first Americans once again.

The earliest inhabitants of North America differed subtly but
significantly from modern native Americans. The difference is clearly seen in
the skull shapes of the first people to colonise the continent, who had
longer, narrower skulls than modern people.

One theory says it is because two distinct groups of people migrated to
North America at different times. But another theory says that just one
population reached the continent and then evolved different physical
attributes, except for a few isolated groups.

Anthropologists once assumed the earliest Americans resembled modern
native Americans. That changed with the discovery of a 10,500-year-old
skeleton called Luzia in Brazil, and the 9000-year-old skeleton of Kennewick
man in Washington state [and the dating of a 13,000 year old skull of a 26
year old woman called Peñon III found on the shores of Lake Texcoco in the
valley of Mexico - bs].

Both had the long, narrow skulls that more resemble those of modern
Australians and Africans than modern native Americans, or even the people
living in northern Asia, who are thought to be native Americans' closest
relatives.

Some researchers argued that they were simply unusual individuals, but
scientists have now identified the same features in recent remains from the
Baja California.

Desert island

The Pericú hunter-gatherers survived until just a few hundred years ago at
the end of the peninsula, says Rolando González-José, of the University of
Barcelona, Spain, (Nature, vol 425, p 62).

He thinks the formation of the Sonora desert isolated the Pericú for
thousands of years, but they vanished when Europeans disrupted their culture.
González-José measured 33 Pericú skulls and found their features were similar
to those of the ancient Brazilian skulls.

This backs the idea that a first wave of long, narrow skulled people from
south-east Asia colonised the Americas about 14,000 years ago. These were
followed by a second wave of people from north-east Asia about 11,000 years
ago, who had short skulls.

This theory has been championed by Walter Neves, at the University of Sao
Paulo, Brazil. He says the second wave may have been larger, and eventually
came to dominate the Americas. "The discovery is exactly what I have
been predicting since the late 1980s," Neves told New Scientist.

However Joseph Powell, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico
in Albuquerque, is not convinced. He thinks the earliest Americans did come
from south-east Asia, but believes they evolved into modern native Americans.

"Even with two waves, each would have changed over the past 10,000 to
12,000 years through adaptation and microevolution," he says. Neves
argues that the change in skull shape after 8000 years ago is too sudden for
evolution.